Researchers have used a combined bottom up and top down approach to determine methane emissions in the U.S. This involved measuring emissions from oil and gas facilities representing about a third of U.S. oil and gas facilities. The resulting estimates were validated by aircraft overflight or satellite observation. The results when scaled to the entire U.S. indicate that methane emissions are 60% higher than EPA estimates. This supports previous research that found that EPA estimates seriously underestimated methane emissions from oil and gas facilities. The researchers suggest that the discrepancy arises because the EPA estimates do not include emissions during abnormal operations of oil and gas facilities. This agrees with the research many years ago of Robert Howarth at Cornell who argued that leakages and other abnormal emissions of methane during fracking and other oil and gas operations erased the carbon advantage of natural gas over coal. Assessment of methane emissions from the U.S. oil and gas supply chain, Ramón A. Alvarez et al., Science 361, 186–188 (2018) 13 July 2018

Latest research supports the work many years ago of Robert Howarth at Cornell who argued that leakages and other abnormal emissions of methane during fracking and other oil and gas operations erased the carbon advantage of natural gas over coal.

Environmental Indexes

From Our Files

In this new study an analysis of new global ocean and land temperature data with corrections to older shipboard measurements reveals that the temperature trend over the period 2000-2014 does not differ from the temperature trend over the period 1950-1999. It is concluded that the “hiatus” reported in IPCC AR5 is most likely an artifact of older measurement techniques.

As the Earth warms, permafrost soils melt and this old carbon is released into the atmosphere as methane and CO2. Using radiocarbon dating of methane bubbles and soil organic carbon from lakes formed by melting thermafrost in Alaska, Canada, Sweden and Siberia combined with remote sensing it is found that methane and carbon dioxide releaed in the Arctic region during the past 60 years is much less than the CO2 contributed annually from anthropogenic and other sources.

A recent study presents evidence that regional warming over the Arctic Ocean can affect mid-latitude Northern Hemisphere continental weather. This study shows that there are two key Arctic regions where regional warming can induce distinguishable cold winters over northern continents. Warming over the Barents–Kara Sea region is likely to lead to East Asian cooling, whereas northern North America cooling is closely related to warming over the East Siberian–Chukchi Sea region.

In 2009 a widely used dataset indicated that the average temperature of the Earth’s surface may have stopped warming, or that it was warming at a lower rate than the long term average. A new analysis shows that the trend for 1998–2012 is indistinguishable from the best estimate of the long trend for 1951–2012.